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Will Menaker4.0

Never let a movie in your cab, in your house or in your heart... unless it is a friend of labor. Danny DeVito directs the shit out of this one.

Matt Singer2.5

Revisiting The Irishman made me curious to go back and watch this biopic. It’s complementary to Scorsese’s film in a lot of ways. Their structures are similar but until Hoffa’s final act, they don’t cover much of the same ground. Scorsese is more interested in Hoffa’s relationship to the mob, while Danny DeVito (yes, this is somehow un film de Danny DeVito) focuses on Hoffa’s rise to power and his penchant for violence and anger. Pacino and Nicholson do seem to be playing the same man, though, and some of the sets and locations — Hoffa’s D.C. office, the Detroit roadhouse where Hoffa was last seen before his disappearance — look very similar.Nicholson’s Midwestern accent goes in and out constantly, but my main issue with Hoffa is DeVito’s character Robert Ciaro, who is an invention of the screenplay (by David Mamet!) but appears by Hoffa’s side at all the key moments of his life. His centrality to Hoffa’s story — even his death, which DeVito depicts as a ludicrous series of events — and his utter lack of a personal life or character traits beyond his love of Jimmy and his interest in the Teamsters, makes him feel less like a fictional character and more like Jimmy Hoffa’s imaginary friend who he spoke to in fits of madness when no one was around.

matt lynch3.0

"Huddie Ledbetter, also known as Leadbelly, said: You take a knife, you use it to cut the bread, so you'll have strength to work; you use it to shave, so you'll look nice for your lover; on discovering her with another, you use it to cut out her lying heart."I'm not sure what the fuck that means either but my point is that this is way more of a David Mamet manifesto than a Jimmy Hoffa biopic.